Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mideast peace process

by Hans Lebrecht

This article was reprinted from the June 8, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel promises now to continue with the peace process not only with the Arab states, but also with the Palestinian authorities (PNA) - however on his own terms.

He said, he will stop all further "surrender" of Palestinian towns and localities to the PNA, and rethink the "redeployment" in Hebron which was due to be implemented in March, but not done by Peres who erroneously speculated that his going back on his signature under the Oslo-2 accord in this respect, may win him support from the Haredim ultras, or from other right-wingers.

Netanyahu stressed that he would go on with the negotiations for the final and permanent stage of the Israeli-Palestinian peace solution, to be implemented not later than 1999, but never agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, as well as to act in order to outlaw any presence of official Palestinian representation in Greater Jerusalem, i.e. in the eastern Arab part of the city.

He has already said he would accelerate the broadening of Jewish colonial settling in eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank and the southern Gaza Strip and spend at least one billion Shekel (approx. 300 million U.S. dollars) government funds for this purpose.

It is also clear that Netanyahu will include in his cabinet such hard-liners of his own party and the Tzomet partner, as Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan, both the architects and responsible ones for the bloody 1982 invasion into Lebanon, including the Sabra/Shatila massacre in Beirut, and the former General-Chief-of-Staff Yitzhak Mordekhai.

He has already begun already palavers with the three Haredic parties Shass, the Torah Jews and the National-Religion party by giving them important ministerial portfolios.

Sharansky's New-Immigrant party, the Third-Way, and possibly the racist Moledet party which propagates the transfer of all Arabs out of Eretz-Israel, will receive portfolios, too. The political and ideological background of Netanyahu was, and is, a right-wing conservative hard-line trend.